Restoring of Deleted Accounts on Windows Domain

Yesterday I tried to remove Exchange 2007 from Windows PDC because we have migrated to Gmail and Exchange is still eating lot of resources from it so one of the steps in removing it was to delete old mailboxes.

But (there is always at least one but) deleting of the mailboxes was including automatically deleting of user accounts on domain so in other words no one could log in on the domain or their own computers connected to domain.

Exploring MSDN and Google for solutions I have learned yesterday that deletion of objects on AD is not meaning that they are deleted directly, it’s rather that they are moved to a side for a quite long time until being deleted. So as it means that they are not deleted, restore should be easy, and it was (thinking on all possible scenarios).

There is one program called ADRestore.net which you can find on this link.

On the link above you can download program and see it in action, so in the end I have succeeded to restore all accounts with help of it.

NOTE: Restoring of the objects does not mean that all of its properties and parameters will be restored with it, so you will need to review them and fix as needed, generate new passwords and so on.